U.S. Supreme Court refuses to hear Obama birth certificate case

The U.S. Supreme Court refused on Monday to hear an appeal from Alan Keyes, Wiley Drake and Markhm Robinson, challenging President Barack Obama's U.S. citizenship and his eligibility to serve as commander in chief.

MSNBC reports that the Supreme Court refused to even comment on the appeal. The Inquisitr also reports that the Supreme Court did not offer any comment as to why they refused to hear the so-called "birther" appeal.

According to The Huffington Post, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had earlier ruled that the challengers do not have legal standing to file the lawsuit.

Los AngelesTimes reports that the Court of Appeals had said that none of the “birthers” who filed suit on Inauguration Day 2009, can show that they suffered harm from Obama's presidency that would give them the right to sue. The court said that even the political candidates who lost to Obama in 2008 would have standing to sue if only they filed complaint alleging unfair competition from an ineligible candidate before the election.

According to Los Angeles Times, the 9th Circuit noted that aside from the plaintiffs’ lack of standing, the challenge of Obama‘s legitimacy to serve as president is a political question beyond any federal court’s power to decide. Only Congress can impeach a president, and any citizen petition for a common-law writ to initiate an inquiry into the legitimacy of the president would have to be brought through the federal court in Washington, D.C.

The Blaze comments that the decision of the Supreme Court to pass over without comment indicates that it found no merit in the appeal. According to The Blaze, with the Supreme Court having declined comment, all Federal courts under the 9th Circuit Court are automatically barred from entertaining any questions on the matter. The Blaze comments further: "Even if Federal courts were to declare President Obama ineligible to hold office, they would have no authority to enforce that ruling. Why? Because removal of a President from office is a power only enjoyed by Congress, pursuant to Article I, Section 3 of the Constitution."

The Huffington Post explains that only "a natural born citizen" of the United States may serve as president. According to the challengers, Obama's father is Kenyan and he (Obama) was born in an African country, and not in Hawaii. They alleged that Obama's Hawaii birth certificate is forgery.

The Huffington Post reports that Hawaii officials have "repeatedly verified Obama's citizenship," and notes that both keyes and Drake ran against Obama on the American Independent Party ticket in 2008, while Robinson serves as the party's chairman.

The Blaze, commenting on objections that have been raised on the authenticity of Obama's certificate, refers to Fox News quoting an expert in Adobe software, Jean-Claude Tremblay, a leading software trainer and Adobe-certified expert. Tremblay addressed various points in the claim that the birth certificate is forgery.

According to Fox News, Tremblay addressed the most serious of the allegations: the claim that layering appears in the document when it is put into Adobe Illustrator. According to Tremblay, the layers are "evidence of the use of common, off-the-shelf scanning software and not evidence of a forgery." He said: “I have seen a lot of illustrator documents that come from photos and contain those kind of clippings—and it looks exactly like this."

According to Fox News, Tremblay explained that the scanner optical character recognition (OCR) software, attempts to translate characters or words in a photograph into text. He said the layers that doubters point to only show the software at work. Tremblay said: "When you open it in Illustrator it looks like layers, but it doesn’t look like someone built it from scratch. If someone made a fake it wouldn’t look like this. Some scanning software is trying to separate the background and the text and splitting element into layers and parts of layers."

MSNBC reports that that Iowa Republicans will met in Des Moines on Saturday to debate whether candidates such as President Obama should have to prove their citizenship before being nominated.